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As if responding to a strange nostalgia for the days when British black comedy ruled the screens, British director Frank Oz (the voice of StarWars' Yoda) has made a movie that is a total throwback.

Death at a Funeral might have been made in the 1960s, not to be released until well past its stale date.

Back in 1966, when Joe Orton's play Loot was first performed in London, this sort of comedy – about stray corpses, failed crimes, ruffled dignity and broken taboos – earned its laughs.

But Orton's bitingly bleak, perverse humour still stands up, while the jokes in Death at a Funeral are like curdled milk: as funny as death warmed over.

Screenwriter Dean Craig seems to have mined decades of scripts in search of the most well-worn gags. For openers, there's the hilarious "Oops, wrong corpse" gambit. "Who's this?" asks Daniel as he opens the lid of the coffin containing a body that is not his father's. Already we can predict that when the right coffin arrives it will be opened many a time.

This movie has it all: jokes about unsuspected hallucinogens, naked people, toilet catastrophes, sex, death, blackmail and religion. And not one of them is original.

As the mourners – a play list of stock characters – begin to arrive at the country home where the deceased, his neurotic wife, their son and his wife have been residing, a sitcom starts to brew.

Matthew MacFadyen, who was so excellent as Darcy in Pride&Prejudice, has the unenviable lead role as Daniel, a fretful man with a handful of index cards containing a eulogy for his father that he knows will fall short of the mark.

Rupert Graves (V for Vendetta) is Daniel's brother Robert, a successful novelist living in New York. He flies in for the funeral in dark glasses and serves to fuel Daniel's anxiety about his writing abilities.

Martha (Daisy Donovan) is first cousin to the brothers and comes with her fiancé in tow.

He is Simon (Alan Tudyk), already despised by Martha's father and soon to provide one of the film's most tedious run-on jokes, wandering naked on a rooftop after ingesting a powerful home-made drug that Martha thought was Valium.

Martha is pursued by the leering Justin (Ewen Bremner) who feels he has a claim on her affections, and just won't give up.

Then there's Uncle Alfie, (British character actor Peter Vaughan, who deserves much better than this) who occasions the feces-sprayed-on-the-face horror as the demanding, cantankerous old boy in a wheelchair.

The stranger at the feast is Peter (Peter Dinklage) the very short man who has a secret he wishes to capitalize on and it concerns the dead father's sexual proclivities.

Eventually Daniel gets to deliver his eulogy, a feel-good speech about his father "who tried his best." As if a moment of respect might allow us to forget all the vulgar humour that has preceded it.

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